Liberals Unwittingly Helping Supreme Court Gut Obamacare

Liberals who aren’t taking the current court challenge to Obamacare seriously risk enabling the healthcare law’s demise, writes Sam Baker in National Journal.

“For the second time, there’s a very real chance that the (Supreme) Court could tear the Affordable Care Act apart. And, also for the second time, some liberals are making the mistake of treating that existential threat like it’s a joke,” Baker writes.
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He quotes Simon Lazarus of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center, who says supporters of the Affordable Care Act lost the PR battle in 2012 over the individual mandate because they treated it as an open-and-shut case and underestimated how much damage it could do.

The latest case takes aim at the ACA’s subsidies for people below certain incomes. Opponents say the law provides for subsidies only for people who buy insurance through state-run exchanges.

Most states’ successfully challenged the mandate that they set up their own exchanges. So residents in those states have had to use the federal exchange, run through HealthCare.org.